Episode Transcript: #565 - Trevor Valle

trevor vallee welcome buddy how's it going man good man when we were i sometimes when people sit

down and you know you just start talking you're like shit shit stop talking we got to record

um trevor's a paleontologist and explain to me the job site thing like when someone's digging

you have to you they need a paleontologist on site in certain places uh well it it all depends on

on really where you are so here in the state of california we have a uh a law called sequa it was

started in 1970 and that mandates mandates that any archaeological or paleontological stuff so like

dead bodies of of you know early californians or glassware all the way up to woolly mammoth bones

or not woolly mammoth but mammoth bones saber-toothed cats stuff like that or even older has to be

mitigated they have to be protected so my job right now i work work for a company called swca

environmental consultants we go out and we make sure that the glassware and the fossils and the

bones and all that that get found by 40 ton excavation machines when they're building new

hotels in downtown wow so yeah i'm standing next to things that could very easily kill you

so when they do that how do they keep from fucking something up like what when they're digging in is

it just dumb luck that oh no they they fuck stuff up that's how we find it so because we we don't have

x-ray vision i can't like look in the ground go hey there's a whale there um so the bulldozers going

by the excavators scooping stuff up and you're just scrambling to check yeah wow it's like it it

it digs this big hole dumps it over i'm looking in the hole and i'm looking over at the spoil pile

where they're mounding everything up and trying to hop back and forth and all of a sudden you hear

this sickening crunch and you're like oh you wave everybody off and there's like this bone sticking